competitor has an advantage over any
other. But how can a fantastic menagerie
ever be a contest among equals?
During the First World War, the U.S.
Army noticed a puzzling pattern
among the young men drafted into mili-
tary service. Soldiers from some parts of
the country had a high incidence of goi-
tre---a lump on their neck caused by the
swelling of the thyroid gland. Thousands
of recruits could not button the collar of
their uniform. The average I.Q. of draft-
ees, we now suspect, also varied according
to the same pattern. Soldiers from coastal
regions seemed more "normal" than sol-
diers from other parts of the country.
The culprit turned out to be a lack of
iodine. Iodine is an essential micronutri-
ent. Without it, the human brain does
not develop normally and the thyroid be-
gins to enlarge. And in certain parts of
the United States in those years there
wasn't enough iodine in the local diet. As
the economists James Feyrer, Dimitra
Politi, and David Weil write, in a recent
paper for the National Bureau of Eco-
nomic Research:
Ocean water is rich in iodine, which is
why endemic goiter is not observed in coastal
areas. From the ocean, iodine is transferred
to the soil by rain. This process, however,
only reaches the upper layers of soil, and it
can take thousands of years to complete.
Heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion, in
which case the iodine-rich upper layers of
soil are washed away. The last glacial period
had the same effect: iodine-rich soil was sub-
stituted by iodine-poor soil from crystalline
rocks. This explains the prevalence of en-
demic goiter in regions that were marked by
intense glaciation, such as Switzerland and
the Great Lakes region.
After the First World War, the U.S.
War Department published a report
called "Defects Found in Drafted Men,"
which detailed how the incidence of goi-
tre varied from state to state, with rates
forty to fifty times as high in places like
Idaho, Michigan, and Montana as in
coastal areas.
The story is not dissimilar from Ep-
stein's account of Kenyan distance run-
ners, in whom accidents of climate and
geography combine to create dramatic
differences in abilities. In the early
years of the twentieth century, the
physiological development of Ameri-
can children was an example of the
"fantastic menagerie that is human bi-
ological diversity."
In this case, of course, we didn't like the
fantastic menagerie. In 1924, the Morton
Salt Company, at the urging of public-
health officials, began adding iodine to its
salt, and initiated an advertising campaign
touting its benefits. That practice has been
applied successfully in many developing
countries in the world: iodine supplemen-
tation has raised I.Q. scores by as much as
thirteen points---an extraordinary in-
crease. The iodized salt in your cupboard
is an intervention in the natural order of
things. When a student from the iodine-
poor mountains of Idaho was called upon
to compete against a student from iodine-
rich coastal Maine, we thought of it as our
moral obligation to redress their natural
inequality. The reason debates over élite
performance have become so contentious
in recent years, however, is that in the
world of sport there is little of that clarity.
What if those two students were compet-
ing in a race? Should we still be able to give
the naturally disadvantaged one the equiv-
alent of iodine? We can't decide.
Epstein tells us that baseball players
have, as a group, remarkable eyesight.
The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum
tested close to four hundred major- and
minor-league baseball players over four
years and found an average visual acuity
of about 20/13; that is, the typical profes-
sional baseball player can see at twenty
feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen
feet. When Rosenbaum looked at the
Los Angeles Dodgers, he found that half
had 20/10 vision and a small number fell
below 20/9, "flirting with the theoretical
limit of the human eye," as Epstein
points out. The ability to consistently hit
a baseball thrown at speeds approaching
a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling
array of spins and curves, requires the
kind of eyesight commonly found in only
a tiny fraction of the general population.
Eyesight can be improved---in some
cases dramatically---through laser surgery
or implantable lenses. Should a promis-
ing young baseball player cursed with
normal vision be allowed to get that kind
of corrective surgery? In this instance,
Major League Baseball says yes. Major
League Baseball also permits pitchers to
replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the
elbow of their throwing arm with a ten-
don taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in
the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement
surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns
the athlete into an improved version of
his natural self.
But when it comes to drugs Major
League Baseball---like most sports---
draws the line. An athlete cannot use a
drug to become an improved version of
his natural self, even if the drug is used in
doses that are not harmful, and is some-
thing that---like testosterone---is no more
than a copy of a naturally occurring hor-
mone, available by prescription to anyone,
virtually anywhere in the world.
Baseball is in the middle of one of its
periodic doping scandals, centering on one
of the game's best players, Alex Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is among the most disliked
"After you've wished once for food, you can stop
using your other wishes on food."